#1 “Top Ten” (September 1999)

Cover Tag: The Power, the Training, the Badge, Are They Enough For Her First Day on the Job?

The Story: New recruit Robyn “Toybox” Slinger arrives fresh from the academy for her first day on the Neopolis police squad. Sergeant Kemlo Caesar, a sentient Doberman who stands upright with an exo-skeleton, assigns her to work with experienced hand Smaxx, an ebon giant with a chip on his shoulder. Slinger and Smaxx handle a domestic disturbance call, then assist two detectives on a homicide crime scene with the corpse of “Saddle” Graczik, a cowboy-themed lowlife. This leads to a raid on the drug lab of Professor Gromolko, who panics during a telepathic interrogation and shoots himself in the head with a nearby officer’s gun. Obviously the matter of what he would die for becomes a pressing question which propels the plot into future issues.



In a B-plot, Ernesto Gograh, a street tough and son of a famous giant monster, threatens repercussions as he’s being booked at the police station.

My Two Cents: The inaugural issue leans heavy on the world-building. It reads a bit like Astro City, introducing a tableau brimming with super-beings who are namechecked rather than seen or understood: Jewel, Warhead, Red Ray, Stargirl, Bronzeman, Fabulous Five. Everybody’s in costume, but few have the heroic physiques to back up their wardrobe. Most are too gangly, too portly, or too elderly to pose a serious threat to a common thug, let alone Galactus. The cab driver Bob “Blindshot” Booker sets the loopy tone from the early pages; he careens his cab through the city causing a string of accidents but not getting so much as a second glance from law enforcement.

Toybox Slinger is a familiar stock character, the optimistic neophyte joining a team of jaded, seasoned professionals, eager to prove her worth and learn the ropes of not only the job but the social scene of her co-workers. Naturally her assigned work partner is not one of the many nice people on the squad, but rather the surly guy still grieving the death of his former partner. This gives Toybox a well-defined mountain to climb, as well as making her a sympathetic figure for the reader as she endures grumbling abuse from Smaxx. It’s essentially the dynamic between Ricky Schroeder and Denis Franz’ characters on the Stephen Bochco cop TV show NYPD Blue. Or Judy Hopps in the Disney film Zootopia.



Robyn Slinger's very cropped T-shirt seems an odd choice for a career woman desiring to be taken seriously at a new job; chalk it up to fan service. She’s also way invested in her “kids’ toys” gimmick, to the point of carrying her tech in an unwieldy cube that ties up both hands much of the time. Somebody buy her a backpack, a large satchel even! Besides, her mechanical critters are too large (and probably heavy) to even fit in the box she carries. I’m confused by her job. She says she’s not interested in being a police detective, just a beat cop, but she’s already getting assigned to work on murders, for which her toys seem a good match.



The supporting cast are a familiar set of stock characters including the mellow cowboy of uncertain hygiene, the randy lesbian, Irma Geddon the doughty warrior matron (clad in power armor bristling with weaponry), the fatherly police captain, the pencil-necked geek, and the naïve bombshell.

There’s also a running gag about an invisible woman-feeler called The Ghostly Goose, and another unseen character, The Rumor. These jokes will continue to run for many more issues. But mainly we’re going to be following two major cases throughout the series: a drug case involving “Boots and Saddle," and a hooker case involving the “Libra” serial killer. Will the two cases turn out to be the same case in the end? Has anybody read a Hardy Boys book?

Easter Eggs: Even more than in Kurt Busiek’s “Astro City,” Top Ten is the sort of comic book where every random character on the street is probably an homage to some character in genre history. There are a whole lot of random characters on the street. Also billboards, vehicles, etc. A magnifying glass helps in examining the pages; I mean that literally. After I started writing these up, I found an old Tripod web site that had a more comprehensive list of Easter Eggs, but without pictures. So take my list as representative of the visual puns that Moore, Ha, and Cannon crammed into their work.

p.1 Ad for a clothing store: “Time for a change of outfit? Stop in at the PHONE BOOTH!” refers to Superman’s occasional location for costume changes. Ad for “Logan’s DNA Dietary Supplement” refers to Wolverine from The X-Men.

p.3 Blindfold’s taxi cab is shaped like a Formula One racecar but has a back seat for passengers.

p. 4: The Police Precinct looks like the Hall of Justice from Super-Friends. We’ve discussed before how this is actually the exterior of the Cincinnati train terminal.



p. 6: Caesar mentions Large Marge, a character name lifted from the film Pee Wee’s Big Adventure. Marge herself appears on page 25 and is indeed quite tall, dressed like a Wild West bordello madame. It’s an Alan Moore story, so of course prostitutes are first mentioned on page 7 and seen by page 15, being booked at the precinct.



p.8: The police cruisers look very Blade Runner. A sign on a distant building says “ABSOLUT KIRBY.”



p. 9 first mention of a family, “The Incredibles.” It’s an obvious enough name, so probably not intentionally stolen by Pixar for the film and family of that name.

p.11 Krypto the Super-Dog (more or less; his cape has an A instead of an S) stands in the street.



p.15 A pizza delivery guy moves at super-speed, with 14 images showing him streaking across a single busy street scene which includes “Tijuana Bibles Bookstore.”



p. 17 The cafeteria worker uses heat vision on the food before serving it. Cesar the Doberman wears a T-shirt: “K9 Unit.” Cute! A later shirt he wears just says “DOG.”



p.19 has wall graffiti: “I have giant-size man thing call 555-3281,” a reference to a comic book which has producing snickers for forty years now. This page also has the first of the many song lyrics that Moore will make up, this time for “What’s Your Power, Baby?” by The Astonishettes (1978). Seems 15 years too late for a girl group, but whatever.



p. 20 SWAT office Bill Bailey appears. Is this a reference to the 1902 pop song “Won’t You Come Home Bill Bailey”? Or just a nod at alliterative comic book character names?

p. 26 the lawyer is a shark, of course. The anthropomorphic kind. We later learn that his name is Larry “Frenzy” Fischmann.



p. 27 Duane the cop has preposterously large revolvers which are said to be “twelve shooters.”

p. 30 A literal Easter egg in the form of a barfly whose cape and pastel helmet show him to be “Meester Easter.” Note also that Phantom Jack, the co-worker trying to hit on Toybox in the bar, is not only selectively intangible but semi-transparent in most scenes.



p. 31 A guy wearing a Cyclops visor snoozes on the subway. Robyn lives in Carlingsville, which sounds like a reference to something.

p. 32 Another song: “Can’t Cloak My Emotions, Can’t Mask My Tears” by Nightingale Brooker.

Yes, I'm going to be selective rather than exhaustive with the Easter Eggs for a few reasons: (1) I don't catch all of the references; (2) The link I gave collects a more (but not entirely) comprehensive list; (3) For reasons of brevity, with an eye toward highlighting details that I will illustrate rather than just mention.



How did the two of them work together? Someone said that Zander Cannon did layouts and Gene Ha did finishes.



Alan Moore, contrarian that he is, offers the antidote to his own disease (the "grim and gritty" approach to superheroes), delivering light and even silly stories that were just as detail-filled as Watchmen or Vendetta. When everyone zigged, he zagged. Top Ten and Astro City make interesting companion pieces in that sense.

I found the obsessive detail and number of costumed characters in the series distracting more than anything else, and was never able to get into it (although I did love the background story, The 49ers).

Without looking into the online annotations, I can tell you Toybox is obviously an offspring of the old UK kids' comics hero General Jumbo, who had a similar gimmick but with military toys. General Jumbo's storylines are incredibly innocuous but many UK creators have fond memories of him, and he's been referenced in other stories by Moore as well as Grant Morrison.

What it called to my mind was the Robin Williams film Toys, which came out in 1992 at the peak of his career, between Aladdin and Mrs. Doubtfire. Williams plays an eccentric toymaker whose creations are commandeered by the military, and he must turn the tables. I don't know whether writer/director Barry Levinson (working with his then-wife Valerie Burton) was inspired by General Jumbo or some similar character, or whether Moore was aware of Levinson's film, which did not do very well, though it had a decent cast including Jane Cusack and Robin Wright. Surely Moore was aware of the UK work you mention.

I love Top Ten! It hasn't been that long since I read it once again. I think my first issue was #6 and I knew before I paid for it that I would have to get all the back issues as soon as possible. (I was at a newsstand and not at a comic-book shop, so I couldn't get any back issues right then.)

I cried when … Oh! No spoilers!

#2 “Blind Justice” (October 1999)

Cover Tag: Keep Moving, Nothing to See Here

The Gograh Case: Blindshot Booker runs his cab into Irma Geddon’s police car, disabling both vehicles in a rough part of town. Smaxx and Toybox are sent to assist. Smaxx has to subdue Ernesto Gograh (see last issue), who is there with his street gang Fabulous 5 being generally menacing.



The Boots and Saddle Case: Charon conducts an autopsy on Professor Gromolko, who shot his own head off with Duane’s welve-shooter revolver gun last issue. Duane expects an inquiry, but his boss Captain Traynor says that Commissioner Ultima is “surprisingly mellow about the news” of Gromolko’s death, so Duane is simply offered psychiatric counseling, which he turns down.

Toybox recognizes that Blindshot’s “Zen Sight” may be of use in their investigation, so she lets him drive her to wherever he wants. This turns out to be an abandoned Museum of Modern History, where she finds Marta “Boots” Wesson, the partner of the deceased "Saddle" Graczik and employee of deceased drug-maker Professor Gromolko.

The Libra Case: Shock-Headed Peter interrupts a hooker/john transaction in an alley between Immune Girl and Andy “Airbag” Soames. He lets them both go with a warning about the Libra serial killer.



Peter’s partner Duane “Dust Devil” also cautions April Showers and the snakelike Miss Ophidia, two of Large Marge’s hookers. Later in the day, Peter and Duane are called to a murder scene in an alley and find it’s Immune Girl, decapitated, an apparent victim of Libra.

My Two Cents: After an introductory issue which mainly established the cast, the series gets fired up in earnest now, with two major cases moving forward and the minor Gograh case for variety. Blindshot Booker nearly mows down several pedistrians as he drives the police to the museum. Somebody puh-leeze pull this guy's license!

Irma’s husband can’t get a job because of laws governing precognitives. I would have thought all the precogs would have cushy government jobs in planning or national security. It’s not as if failing to employ them turns off their knowledge of future events. And if you don’t give them lawful employment, surely many of them will turn to crime to feed their families. Not smart, Neopolis politicians!

We saw Officer Sung Li, a.k.a. Girl One, last issue and find out more about her now. She’s naked and purple but has a constantly changing array of shapes across her body, from Batman-style “POW!” and “ZAP!” sound effects to abstract shapes. She is convinced that these patterns hide the fact that she has no clothes, but that is patently not the case for either the reader or the other characters. She’s irate to discover that her sergeant Caesar the Doberman is colorblind and thus sees her without the camouflage pattern, as if that would make much of a difference. Her naïveté on this matter would be ridiculous if taken at face value; surely it’s a satire on the long history of comic book characters being portrayed as if designs painted on a naked body should be interpreted as clothing. She’s no more naked than (or perhaps, just as naked as) the average Marvel or DC heroine.

Irma's calling out of Sung Li as being an "Asiatic" suggests racial insensitivity. She's a gun-toting Christian right winger (on a later Christmas-themed cover, she's written "Jesus is the Reason for the Season" on her armor), but in Moore's hands, she's a sympathetic character, just one of the diverse personalities populating the police squad.





The “Libra killer” is an obvious riff on the Zodiac Killer who murdered several people and taunted police with cryptic clues in San Francisco in the years around 1970.

Easter Eggs:
Page 4: Wall graffiti says “Pork: The other white meat” with a picture of a policeman. Also “V for Ventura” (as in Jesse Ventura). The pharmacy of Dr. Randolph Rousch offers “Live Leeches” and “Limbs surgically implanted, one hour.” Every surface is tagged with a pentagram and/or "F5," both representing the gang Fabulous 5.

Page 8: A store advertises:”Power Kosmik: $5/kWr.”

Page 10: A poster warns of the AIDS-like disease S.T.O.R.M.S. (sexually transmitted organic rapid mutation syndrome).

p.12: A marquee promises “Exotic robots, topless goddesses.” A poster says, “Live! Two way alien combos. See invisible girls live on the big stage.”

p.13: A distant billboard reads “The Replacement God: H.P. Lovecraft’s Good Comics” I think. A building near the precinct house is “Church of the Great Hole in the Ground.” A flatbed trailer has two giant heads with Kirbyesque headgear. I think that “creature that is a giant head” is an anime thing? Must be from Japanese myth or something. The stretchy guy at the bottom of the panel is the same Mr. Incredible that Smaxx and Toybox encountered during their domestic disturbance call last issue. It appears that his Incredi-car has crashed into a red vehicle at the far left of the panel, and now he's arguing with the driver.



p.15: Caesar eats at a table in the cafeteria, his plate a dog bowl labeled “Sarge.”

p.18: A neighborhood called “Noho,” presumably the opposite of Soho. A costumed man with amputated legs sits on the street begging for money, his sign declaring him “A victim of the ’92 circulation wars.” A flying kid in a ragged red cape and spiky black hair looks like young Tetsuo from Akira.



p.20: At the precinct house, a sign on a bulletin board warns, “No beam weapons in the mechanics…” A Captain-America looking guy strides through the lobby with an American flag cape.



p.23: Museum exhibits include “Sturm und Drang,” “Herr Panzer,” and “The Iron Mask.” We'll learn more about this period of Top Ten history in the 49ers mini-series. For now, we just learn that the period exists.

I really do not know Alan Moore that well and this thread will be an interesting one indeed -- sound very intriguing and might open a whole new world for me.